Library Wins $1 Million Challenge Grant

The library has been granted a $1 million challenge grant by the
National Endowment for the Humanities to create an endowment to support the
purchase and preservation of the humanities collections.

To qualify, the library will have to raise $4 million in matching gifts. The
award will be used to create endowments, the income from which will be used to
maintain and preserve Berkeley's humanities collections.

The $5 million endowment will support curriculum and research in American
cultures, and international and area studies and will build in all formats:
books, periodicals, manuscripts, pictorial images, data files and networked
resources.

The difficulties of maintaining accessible, organized collections in the face
of burgeoning new publications, decaying old ones, increasing costs and
declining budgets have challenged the ability of great libraries such as
Berkeley to continue to build and sustain extraordinary collections.